Chris Monson

Designer/Software Developer

Lightforge

Lightforge is a professional grade lighting control software that allows you to create lighting shows faster and easier than ever before. It's unique suite of innovative tools give you more freedom to focus on the art of lighting while spending less time dealing with the tools to manage it. This project was released commercially in the fall of 2015. It has already been used on internationally touring shows, off Broadway shows, and many other concerts and performances. You can find more information on this project at www.visualsorcery.com

Vengeance - Starship Bridge Simulator

This game is a cooperative starship combat simulator where a group of people work together on the bridge of a starship to engage and destroy their enemies. It is played with between 2, and 6 people per starship, all on different computers in the same room. The players each control an individual station that deals with a particular aspect of the ship, such as Helm, Weapons, Engineering, Science, etc. The game can be played in a variety of ways, everything from Players vs AI, Players vs RTS, Player Ship vs Player Ship, Multiple Player ship coop vs AI, or pretty much any combination of those options. Players can create custom ships, with custom interfaces through an included ship creator.

Foresight - Lighting Visualizer

Foresight has been developed out of necessity. Through the process of working on the Lightforge it became apparent that we needed a flexible testing rig to make sure the console was functioning properly, as well as to show people a 3d visual representation of the consoles output, and basically just simulate in real time what the lighting on stage would look like. To that end I developed an artnet lighting visualizer first using Blender's game engine and python scripting, and later ported it over to the Unity game engine. In it's current state it is more of an in house testing tool than a publicly releasable piece of software, but we'll see what the future holds, and what sort of demand there is for it.

The Harvest

The Harvest is a unique brand of RTS game. Essentially you play the game as a god who is in charge of managing a civilization. The interesting part is that you have no direct ability to control what your people do. You control the environment they live in, and everything else is up to them. You gain power via the prayers of your people, and use that power to dish out your blessings or wrath. For each person who dies, you gain a soul, and souls can be used to purchase new abilities. Your choices determine the type of god you will be, and your people will love you, or fear you for it. This game is being written using the Unity game engine.

Projection Mapping System

This system allows for the creation of complex projection mapping systems for use in live performance. It allows for integration with lighting control via artnet and midi show control for dynamic control of the projection. It also integrates with professional SDI video cards for HD output.

BlenderFarm

A cloud based distributed render farm for dramatically speeding up animation renders at incredibly low costs. This system allows for the submission of project files which then get distributed to high powered cloud computing nodes for rendering and then return the rendered frames back to the central server for download.